The question that makes fundies hostile

[Jacob(smooth)]

Interesting question. What manner of demonstrations would you consider appropriate? Obviously personal experience and anecdotal reports are invalid as they are, by definition, seething with selection bias.

So to support the case for religion I looked for some actual large scale properly carried out studies, and found a rather good multi centre cohort study!

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Ummmm....

Shit.


Oh well, correlation is not the same as causation. And It appears that religion only correlates with higher rates of depression in the UK (having been through a few denominations and types of UK churches i;m not actually surprised about that).

I hate when the data does not back up my prejudice.

Errrr, repent etc.

Have to agree Jacob - very unexpected findings indeed.

Of course for the UK its possible that religion and spirituality tend to attract people who are already depressed, or who have a tendency towards depression, in which case correlation and causation would be different.

Its also worth bearing in mind that in the main Church of England churches are cold and depressing places to spend any time.

Greek Orthodox churches are often quite beautiful in contrast.

Indeed!
Although it would do disservice to such a well carried out the service to misinterpret the results. This is a cohort study which can therefor establish a correlation, but not a causal link. As max said one has to consider common cause.

The question being "Does religion promote happiness" we are studying religious groups against atheist ones. Let's flip that and say "Does aspirin help headaches".

If we looked at people who take aspirin and compare them to people who don't, we might very well find that there is a higher incidence of headaches in the "takes aspirin" group. That does not mean aspirin caused the headaches, nor that it doesn't help. It's a correlative, not a causal link.

That's why the study, which is rather well written up, speaks of religion not acting as a buffer. It's a forward looking variable rather than a backwards one.

I suspect there is a common cause of both religion and depression.

Fascinating stuff, especially the variance between countries. That suggests to me that it's the style of religiosity rather than the object of it, which is significant (in either direction).

Science is fun!